Marco Canora Gives Hearth a Healthy Tuneup

The chef Marco Canora has adopted a pro-fat, anti-processed-food, back-to-basics regimen over the last few years that has transformed his health and the way he views food. Now he wants his East Village restaurant, Hearth, to follow suit.

On Jan. 2, Mr. Canora — who helped fuel a craze for bone broth last year when he started selling his homemade meat elixirs out of a window at Hearth — will close the restaurant for nine days or so. When it reopens, the 12-year-old fixture at the corner of 12th Street and First Avenue will have spruced-up décor and a reconfigured menu with a manifesto on the back, listing the health-oriented rules that will henceforth guide all the cooking in Mr. Canora’s kitchen.

The changes, while sweeping, do not mean that Hearth is about to limit its menu to cold-pressed juices and kale salads. In an age dominated by food-based belief systems (vegan, Paleo, gluten-free), Mr. Canora’s rootsy, meaty viewpoint on what qualifies as healthful would put him at odds with the glam-vegan camp.

His new approach, he said, will focus on eliminating highly processed oils, flours and sugar, while making sure that every ingredient (vegetables and grains, yes, but also fish, butter, oil and offal) comes from the most pristine sources he can find and afford.

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The new menu at Hearth will be more vegetable-focused. Here, the radish salad with pickled cherry peppers, mustard greens and buttermilk.CreditMorgan Ione Yeager for The New York Times

These days, conversations about the provenance of ingredients often revolve around fast-food and fast-casual restaurants like McDonald’s and Chipotle, or elite gastronomic magnets like Noma in Copenhagen and Blue Hill at Stone Barns in Pocantico Hills, N.Y.

Mr. Canora’s shift reflects the way such concerns are also making an impact on neighborhood restaurants, where industrial tubs of butter and sacks of sugar are more common than most chefs (and diners) care to admit.

It’s a risky move, because the changes are ambitious and expensive. But Mr. Canora, 47, believes that the risk is worth taking in order to serve “foods that are nutrient-dense,” he said, and free of antibiotics, growth hormones and problematic additives.

“People need to start asking more from their food than it tastes delicious,” he said. “Not to undermine the importance of delicious. I’m not advocating for a boiled chicken breast.” He added, “I care about what I put in my mouth.”

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The bun-free “variety burger” made with brisket, chuck, heart, liver and bone marrow.CreditMorgan Ione Yeager for The New York Times

As the Hearth manifesto makes clear (with delightfully unthreatening illustrations by the artist Libby VanderPloeg), the restaurant is reassessing almost every ingredient. Some of the changes are already in place, but in January they will become official policy.

For pastas and other dishes, Mr. Canora’s team will step up the practice of milling its own flour and polenta from heirloom varieties of grain that haven’t been genetically modified. The cheap, chemically processed canola oil that’s commonly found in fryers around the city will be verboten. “Dude, it’s death,” he said.

Mr. Canora wants to pledge allegiance to cooking oils that he sees as more healthful, such as rice bran oil, and he wants the only butter that’s used at the restaurant to come from grass-fed cows.

The menu at Hearth will become much more vegetable-focused, but it will also amplify an emphasis on offal. “When the cheetah takes down the gazelle, the first and only thing it eats are the guts!” the manifesto says. “It realizes where the biggest bang for the buck lies in terms of nutrients.” (The restaurant is already serving a bun-free “variety burger” made with brisket, chuck, heart, liver and bone marrow.)

In desserts, Hearth will shift toward pricier sweeteners like honey, dates and maple syrup. With seafood dishes, it will focus on local, often wild fish “that are caught or grown in an environmentally sustainable manner,” as the manifesto outlines.

Last year, Mr. Canora parted ways with Paul Grieco, his longtime partner and wine director at Hearth. That change, along with a fresh revenue stream from Mr. Canora’s broths, has made him “free to make Hearth exactly what I want it to be,” he said.

As described last year in his book “A Good Food Day,” much of that change stems from a health crisis that Mr. Canora experienced a few years ago. He was overweight. He had gout. His cholesterol numbers were troubling, and an examination of his blood sugar indicated that he was on the brink of developing diabetes.

He responded by cutting back on sugar, white-flour-based carbohydrates and alcohol, while increasing the percentage of his diet devoted to vegetables, proteins and what he considers “good fats,” as presented in books like “Nourishing Traditions” by Sally Fallon.

“I started losing weight, I got energetic, my mood shifted,” he said. “I wasn’t so depressed anymore. I’m a living, breathing example. It literally made me a better person.” He hopes customers will leave the rebooted Hearth feeling the same way.

He won’t abandon his Tuscan roots, though. Deeply Italian dishes like ribollita, braised rabbit, gnocchi and pork ragù will stick around. “That’s in my DNA,” Mr. Canora said. If anything, his new approach is even more inspired by the rustic, from-the-earth gastronomy of Tuscany. “It’s just going back to traditional ways of eating,” he said.